Vladimir Putin is a known storyteller. In his rambling tales, the Russian president recasts the Rurik dynasty as the origin of Russian, not Ukrainian, history and the justification for Russia’s false claim to the independent, sovereign nation of Ukraine.
Tucker Carlson, the American journalist, famously broadcast Putin retelling this saga to the world in 2024. When Putin repeated it behind closed doors at their Alaska meeting last summer, President Donald Trump was so bored, he had to ask Putin to skip it , reports claimed. To lend his story gravitas, Putin re-arranges the biographies of the Cossacks, Catherine the Great, Lenin and others. Doing so allows Russia to look beyond its borders for Russian speakers to ‘defend’, or to identify borders that need redrawing according to a centuries-old fairytale.
